My Pinboard fake-free-trial experience

pinboard_experience.md

My Pinboard fake-free-trial experience

Every timestamp is in GMT -4.

At 2021-10-15 22:04:50 I've successfully purchased a one-year subscription plan on https://pinboard.in, which costed $22 USD (R$ 132,68 BRL in my currency).

Pinboard claims that there is a seven-day trial period after signup which is FULLY REFUNDABLE. This can be proven in the web archive snapshots from Oct 8th:

• FAQ page. See #free_trial, #refund and #archival_test fragments.
• Sign Up page.

After one week of usage (precisely at 2021-10-22 14:43 GMT -04:00), I decided to refund my subscription and emailed support@pinboard.in. No answer was provided, so after few days I tried to reach out in more ways:

1. Oct 26 15:52 - Replied to my own email asking about it
2. Oct 27 15:22 - Sent a private message on Pinboard's twitter account
3. Oct 28 14:31 - Replied to my own email again and forwarded the email to maciej@ceglowski.com (which is the email displayed in the Pinboard's twitter bio)
4. Oct 29 01:15 - Posted a public tweet
5. Oct 30 06:28 - Issued a ticket on PayPal

After all those attempts, I realized that I was probably being scammed for two reasons:

First, many people already experienced the same issue. See:

• https://ybbond.id/posts/2020-06-on-trial-refund-support/
• https://cards.producthunt.com/cards/comments/846595
• https://twitter.com/scorpioares/status/922732898653847552
• https://twitter.com/ybbond/status/1273099013693280256
• https://twitter.com/lojic/status/375409467921145857
• https://twitter.com/Si_Boehm/status/1389497584973230081
• https://twitter.com/5hay/status/1053420555372781569

Second, Pinboard is active on twitter. This means that the main and single developer is still alive and simply does not answer any refund requests (by incompetence or negligence).

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UPDATE: After replying to one of Pinboard's tweet, he closed the PayPal ticket and refunded my money.